Create a Floodlight column

A Floodlight column is a column you create to report on a specific Floodlight activity group or any combination of Floodlight activity groups or Floodlight activities. If you're tracking multiple activities on your site, creating a Floodlight column makes it easy to pick and choose which Floodlight activities to analyze.

Choose a metric

If the Floodlight activities you add to a column are used to track actions, you can report on such metrics as the total number of actions or the cost per action, and so on. Likewise, if the Floodlight activities track transactions, you can report on such metrics as the total number of transactions, the total revenue, the cost per transaction, and other transaction-related metrics.

For example, if you sell software on your site, you may want to see which keywords lead to free downloads vs. paid downloads to help optimize keyword landing pages. With Floodlight columns, you can add just the two activities to easily compare statistics. If you're just interested in any download, you can create a new column that combines the metric from both activities into one column.

As another example, you select a Floodlight activity named Email sign-up and select the Actions metric. The new column will display the count of email sign-ups. If you select Cost/action instead, you’ll see the cost per email sign-up.

Create a Floodlight column

Click Floodlight activities under the Available columns header.
A list of your existing Floodlight columns appears.

Click Create a new column.

Name your column and select the Floodlight activities and/or Floodlight activity groups whose data you want to include in the column.

Use the Metric dropdown to select the metric you want to report on.

The type of metric needs to match the type of Floodlight activities you selected. For example, if you select Action Floodlight activities, you need to select the Actions, Cost/action, Action conv % or other action-related metrics. If you select a transaction-related metric, the column will display 0.

Click Save to add the column to your reporting table.

Under Selected columns, drag and drop the new column to the desired location.

Advertiser-level columns: These are advertiser-level columns. In other words, you won’t see them at the agency level, but you will at the advertiser, campaign, ad group, ad, or keyword level.

No filter support: Floodlight columns are not supported in filters. They don't appear in the list of available filters.

Floodlight activity groups: In the column selection tool, selecting a Floodlight activity group is the same as selecting all of the Floodlight activities under the group at the time of column creation. If you later add a new Floodlight activity under the Floodlight activity group, the column will not automatically include data for that activity. If you do create new Floodlight activities, we recommend you review the definitions of your existing Floodlight columns and create new ones as necessary.

Currently, the Floodlight column selection tool shows all Floodlight activities within the advertiser’s Floodlight configuration. In other words, if you filtered some Floodlight activities through Floodlight instructions, the filtered activities will still appear in the column selection tool.

If you create a Floodlight column with such a filtered Floodlight activity, the column will display stats of 0. The Floodlight instructions filter the data, even though the Floodlight activities still appear in the column selection tool. This is a known issue that we’ll fix in a future release.